Employee Counseling Services: Ethical Dilemmas

Issues surrounding the definition, identification, and handling of emotional problems in the work environment are presented. Strategies for dealing with these dilemmas are provided.     

GRIEVANCES: A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Behavioral and industrial relations literature on grievances were reviewed. As a result, serious methodological, theoretical, and ethical questions were raised. Fundamental research is required to establish the reliability of grievance phenomena. Further, the use of grievance data as criteria is dubious because of conceptual problems of deficiency and contamination. Given existing threats to traditional grievance systems, basic research, especially program evaluation, on proposed structural and behavior variants of grievance procedures is necessary.     

Is Silence Really Golden? The Role of Spiritual Voice in Folk Pedagogy and Folk Psychology

Most recently, considerable attention has been focused on the social construction of knowledge and an internalist, first‐person perspective on learning. Included in this paradigm shift is a particular ‘hybrid’ of both psychology and educational theory often referred to as ‘theory of mind’ (ToM research) or folk psychology. This article outlines models of teaching, learning, and mind in the hopes that such an advance in understanding children's minds will lead to an improved pedagogy. To address the issues of emotion and ‘spiritual voice’ that may constrain learning in the classroom and self‐development, Belenky et al.’sfive epistemological perspectives or ‘Women's Ways of Knowing’ (New York, Basic Books, 1986) are couched within the framework of Olson and Burner's [Folk Psychology and Folk Pedagogy, in: D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds) Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching and Schooling, pp. 9‐27 (Oxford, Blackwell)] four models of mind, teaching and learning. At issue is the dialogical relation between folk psychology and folk pedagogy and its contingency on both culture and context.     

Community and Christianity in the Black Church

The authors explore the experience of Christian religion for many African Americans. In response to racial discrimination and prejudice within churches, African Americans developed a Christian tradition with distinct meanings, beliefs and practices. This tradition provides a foundation for social activism within the church, community and American society, as well as community among church members. The recent Black church burnings are discussed with respect to the more traditional Christian African American view of religion. Implications for incorporating the religious traditions of Christian African Americans into counseling practice are explored. (The authors use the term Black church or African American church as a surrogate for Christian African American church throughout the article. The terms Black and African American will also be used interchangeably).     

Moral Cosmology, Religion, and Adult Values for Children

We hypothesize that the religiously orthodox, who are theologically communitarian/authoritarian in seeing individuals as subsumed by a larger community of believers and as subject to timeless divine law, are more likely to value obedience in children over autonomy than are theological modernists, who are theologically individualistic in seeing individuals, not a deity, as the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong. We hypothesize further that differences in moral cosmology (orthodoxy vs. modernism) within faith traditions are more important for the values adults seek to instile in children than are differences between traditions. Through analyses of national data from the 1998 General Social Survey, we find strong confirmation of both hypotheses. Moral cosmology is the single-most important factor in valuations of obedience and autonomy in children. While evangelical Protestants differ from Catholics, mainline Protestants, and those with no religion in their values for children, moral cosmology is associated with differences in values for children within each of the faith traditions, including evangelical Protestants. We conclude that intra-faith differences in moral cosmology are key in explaining values for children, but have not completely supplanted interfaith differences .     

EMPLOYEE SELF-SERVICE TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE: A COMPARISON OF PRE-IMPLEMENTATION AND POST-IMPLEMENTATION RELATIONSHIPS

Implementation of employee self-service (ESS) technology presents a variety of challenges for organizations as they strive to maximize return on investment and change management. Using a research framework grounded in the theory of planned behavior, this study examines factors that enhance user acceptance of ESS technology both before and after implementation. Results suggest that employees are more likely to intend to use ESS technology when they have positive attitudes toward using it and when subjective norms in the organization support use of the technology. Perceived organizational support (POS) enhanced the effect of managerial pressure on perceptions of normative beliefs supporting use of the technology post-implementation. Implications of the research and future research directions are discussed.     

Enhancing relationship perceptions by reducing felt inferiority: The role of attachment style

To trust in a romantic partner’s acceptance and love, people need to believe they are just as good a person as their partner (and that their partner shares this perception). Yet, people low in attachment security may have difficulty sustaining these beliefs. Two experiments examined the consequences of reducing felt inferiority to the partner. Participants high in attachment anxiety (Experiment 1) and attachment avoidance (Experiment 2) reported greater confidence in their partner’s acceptance and love and attached greater value to their partner when led to feel (or to believe their partner saw them as) superior to their partner. Thus, reducing felt inferiority may effectively enhance relationship perceptions for people relatively low in attachment security.     

ACTION TRAINING FOR CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP: TWO EVALUATIONS OF STUDIES OF A COMMERCIAL TRAINING MODULE ON INSPIRATIONAL COMMUNICATION OF A VISION

An action training program that teaches inspirational communication of a vision as part of a training of charismatic leadership for managers is presented (1½ days) and evaluated in 2 studies ( N = 25 and N = 22). We used the research design "nonequivalent dependent variable design" (Cook & Campbell, 1979, p, 118) or "internal referencing strategy" (Haccoun & Hamtieux, 1994), which compared the trained behaviors (charismatic inspirational communication) with behaviors that were not trained (public speech) to control for testing and Hawthorne effects. The training had specific positive effects on those behaviors that were trained but not on those variables that were not trained. Good to excellent effect sizes appeared as a result of the training. We suggest that this research design is useful for evaluation of training effects within the constraints of commercial settings and, moreover, we argue that this design is in many ways superior to a nonequivalent nontraining control group design because it controls for testing effects and for effects that otherwise would need a pseudo-training control group.